Erin Shaw picks weeds at Stonehocker Farmhouse garden in Northglenn on June 22, 2016. The Adams County Garden Co-op was started 11 years ago by a resident who has expanded the county’s community garden listings to more than 20 locations all over the county.

Scattered around churchyards, pocketed on school grounds and sewn around neighborhoods throughout Adams County are more than 20 community gardens that are all part of a co-op where the majority of the produce is donated to low-income residents.

“The first year we had six gardens, and then it went to seven and then 13 and then 20 and so on,” said Tom Rapp, Adams Community Gardens CO-OP facilitator. “Our volunteers who plant and maintain the gardens take a small, informal share of what comes out of the ground, and everything else goes to the food banks.”

The Adams Community Gardens CO-OP was started about a decade ago by Rapp, a Thornton resident and director of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of Adams and East Arapahoe counties, to help fill a widening gap of available organic produce to local residents who can’t afford much of it in grocery stores.

According to a 2006 Food Security Study done by Adams County, a large number of area residents who use food stamps and other assistance programs generally had less nutritious diets because of food costs. Approximately 18 percent of the county’s population are considered food insecure.

“The study indicated that one way to help address the food needs of persons requiring food assistance would be to increase the amount of garden vegetables donated to area food banks,” Rapp said. “Community and individual gardens are good sources of produce.”

He said last year, the co-op provided an estimated 7.1 tons of produce, or 56,602 servings to about 15 food banks and pantries from Thornton and Commerce City all the way to Strasburg and Deer Trail.

“When we get the produce in, it’s gone in no time,” said Jo Edgar, director of the Thornton Food Bank. “We get vegetables, herbs and things like that basically once a week throughout the entire season until frost comes.”

The Thornton Food Bank on the Skyview Academy High School campus serves about 200 residents from Welby to south Thornton every month.

“Our clients absolutely love it,” Edgar said. “We’re a small food bank, and so (the Adams Community Gardens CO-OP) is a very valuable resource to us.”

A fluctuating roster of about 300 volunteers, many from the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, (a sub sect of AmeriCorps), and the Senior Hub in Federal Heights, tend to the grounds operated by the co-op. Each garden location has a responsible gardening team, with a lead gardener who meets monthly with Rapp.

Gardening supplies are almost completely donated, and water for the plots is provided by each gardening team.

“As a CO-OP I’ve been able to approach companies to get seeds and seedlings to the tune of several thousand dollars a year,” Rapp said. “And several of our leaders have taken the Colorado Master Gardener Program at the CU Extension Campus in Brighton, which has been an alliance of ours since the beginning.”

Partnerships developed over the past decade have expanded the co-ops’ network of low-income assistance organizations that benefit from the gardens. The Tri-County Health Department’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program operates three gardens for the co-op in Thornton, Commerce City and Brighton.

“Clients of our WIC program don’t have to buy a plot, they just have to give some time to help with planting and maintenance in our beds … and then they take produce shares from the garden,” said Judy Fowler, a nutrition manager for the Tri-County Health Department, which is in Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties.

“There is a diet disparity that is happening with lower-income people consuming less fruits and vegetables, and Adams County has a very high percentage of low income population,” she said. “Our role is to get our clients out here to teach them how to grow their own food and help them get food beyond the vouchers that we can give them.”

Behind the historic Stonehocker Farmhouse in the center of the Fox Run subdivision straddling Northglenn and Thornton is one of the co-op’s community vegetable gardens tended by those clients and volunteers of Tri-County. That plot is one of the largest in the co-ops garden network, which stretches from Regis University in Denver to Westminster to Brighton.

At the end of each growing season, the co-op usually hosts a potluck lunch at the Stonehocker Community Garden, which is open to the gardeners from all of the gardens.

“We are hoping to expand our supply network to also include donations from home gardens willing to plant a row to be donated to the food banks,” Rapp said. “We’re fighting the curve in regard to an increasing population with a rising number of low-income families, but we’re providing an input of food into the system that wasn’t there before.”